Curtis Harrington, 1928 - 2007.

Director Curtis Harrington, who worked on avant-garde films, 60s schlock and nighttime TV soaps, died Sunday at his house in the Hollywood Hills of natural causes. He was 80.

Pat Saperstein, Variety.

Curtis was more than a film and television director; he was also the first film critic (of whom I am aware) to make the ascent into the director's chair. He wrote a book about his favorite director Josef von Sternberg in 1948 (very early for a book about an individual director) and he was also a contributor to Films & Filming and Films Illustrated in the early 1950s. People talk about directors like Bogdanovich, Coppola, Scorsese and DePalma being the first generation of directors raised on movies, but Curtis was making films before any of them - and he was making films that were in their own way recursive, depending on the audience's knowledge of the screen languages formulated by Sternberg and by the great suspense masters Hitchcock, Lewton and Clouzot.

Tim Lucas.

Updated through 5/10.

See also interviews by Harvey F Chartrand (GC), Chuck Stephens (Filmmaker), the Terror Trap, Peter Tonguette (Bright Lights) and Rusty White (Entertainment Insiders).

Updates: Peter Nellhaus recalls studying one of Harrington's shorts; he posts some fine images from Night Tide, too.

"Curtis Harrington was something of a role model for me, if only because he moved so gracefully through so many barriers that seem impenetrable to others, the barriers between amateur and professional, between critic and artist, between avant-garde and mainstream," writes C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark. "A true film buff, he was just as likely to be seen in the audience - at film festivals and revivals in the Los Angeles area - as on the screen."

Updates, 5/9: More from Tim Lucas.

John Coulthart focuses on Night Tide and Harrington's work with Kenneth Anger.

Jerry Lentz traces the line from Poe to Griffith Park.

"Was Harrington what Jean Cocteau might have been had Cocteau been taken under the wing of low-budget exploitation filmmakers in Los Angeles?" wonders Glenn Kenny. "Maybe. But Harrington's sometime friend Kenneth Anger was closer to being an American Cocteau. Harrington's career gave us all a knottier riddle to figure out."

Updates, 5/10: "Producer and screenwriter Dennis Bartok, former head of programming for the American Cinematheque, said that 'one of the things that was so great about Curtis was his movies almost occupied their own genre,'" quotes Dennis McLellan in the Los Angeles Times. "'They definitely had elements of the macabre, horror and the supernatural,' Bartok said. 'But they were also very singular and individualistic, very mysterious and elegant. Also very experimental: You could see ties to all the avant-garde films he had done in the late 40s and early 50s.'"

Tim Lucas: "Last night I decided to spend a little time with Curtis Harrington by refreshing my memory of his first major studio production, Games (1967)."

Posted by dwhudson at May 8, 2007 4:03 AM